What a dirtbag. While saying he wants to "come clean", he at the end continues to claim he ran all those times clean and only doped to "recover from injuries". My reaction to all his whining excuses is "cry me a river", that's what all athletes who compete against him struggle with. Deal with it or get a real job.

I guess one can glean some insight into his character from the part where he dropped and show-boated pushups before crossing the line. One doesn't have a whole lot upstairs to be taking their hematocrit into the 50s with no more medical training than knowing how to use a tourniquet and stick a needle in one's arm.

He's not the first amateur to be caught. The name escapes me but there was some college/high level amateur 4-5 years ago who set some very suspicious PRs. He was running races where he was being tested, however, and took a chance to inject again right after being tested...and they came back and testing him again just days later and he was busted. You don't hear about it much because testing for EPO is expensive (it takes a technician 3 days to run the test!), so they use it strategically.

"If you want to be a bad a$s, then do what a bad a$s does. There's your pep talk for today. Go Run." -- Slo_Hand

I guess one can glean some insight into his character from the part where he dropped and show-boated pushups before crossing the line.

I thought the same thing, this kind of reminded me of Clemens throwing the broken bat at Piazza in what was probably a roid fueled rage. Maybe all those extra red blood cells screwed with his thinking.

Sucks - I remember a picture posted here with him in a 1500 or mile on the track and he was wearing board shorts and looked like a linebacker.(180 pounds) - Kindof like Solinsky, I root for the big guys. The picture in the article he looks a lot thinner.

I agree he is full of shit ~ Although I think Hellebuyck targeted races that he though would not test. Hesch was dirty and ran races that should have tested? I guess that makes him dirty and stupid.

In the privacy of a bathroom stall, Hesch held the vials against his inner thigh, secured them under his shorts with plastic wrap and walked back across the border. On the next two trips he simply stuffed the vials into his pockets.

“You get a little nervous when you just brought it back into the country,” he said, recalling the first trip. “You just want to start driving and get away from the border because you feel the dirtiness of what you just did. Yet you have the EPO in the seat next to you, and you can’t escape it.”

He says that, then tries to say that he raced clean and anyone can run those times........hypocrit

The pain that hurts the worse is the imagined pain. One of the most difficult arts of racing is learning to ignore the imagined pain and just live with the present pain (which is always bearable.) - Jeff

The odd thing is the delusional statement at the very end of the article. He is convinced that the doping didn't help him -- we have seen this delusional behavior with so many dopers. It's as if it's a side-effect of the drug.

Sounds like he was more or less living hand to mouth and made an economic decision not to fight. That's all. Big whoop. His story about coming clean is just a continuation of him lying to himself and others.

As for "recovering from injuries" part... That's just semantics. I would expect anyone who is truly pushing their potential might always be "recovering" from something. Perhaps the drugs just allowed him to push is body past where it would have other wise gone.

The odd thing is the delusional statement at the very end of the article. He is convinced that the doping didn't help him -- we have seen this delusional behavior with so many dopers. It's as if it's a side-effect of the drug.

Mental gymnastics to try and find a way to feel okay about what they are doing.

"If you want to be a bad a$s, then do what a bad a$s does. There's your pep talk for today. Go Run." -- Slo_Hand

Reading about all the Armstrong stuff... and how easy it apparently was for many elite cyclists to avoid getting caught, together with the recent stories about the ease of getting epo in Kenya I'm coming to the view that it's highly likely that there are a lot of elite distance runners who have been doping - which is rather depressing.

The testing regime for runners is far less rigorous than it has been for cyclists in recent years...

The other thing these types of stories always remind me of is how difficult the life of a sub national class professional runner is. If you're not one of the household names like Ritz or Hall or Meb, it's really hard to eek out a living off of running. This guy was a sub 4 minute miler and here he was running around cherry picking races with prize money and weak fields, paying his own way to races and making $40k in prize money in two years. Fuck that.

It's no wonder that only a handful of the very very top runners choose to pursue it as a career. Especially since most D1 college runners actually come out of it with degrees from good schools.

The other thing these types of stories always remind me of is how difficult the life of a sub national class professional runner is. If you're not one of the household names like Ritz or Hall or Meb, it's really hard to eek out a living off of running. This guy was a sub 4 minute miler and here he was running around cherry picking races with prize money and weak fields, paying his own way to races and making $40k in prize money in two years. Fuck that.

It's no wonder that only a handful of the very very top runners choose to pursue it as a career. Especially since most D1 college runners actually come out of it with degrees from good schools.

Yup. But that $40K means a heck of a lot more in rural Kenya than it does here, so they get a bigger pool of people willing to go for it.

"If you want to be a bad a$s, then do what a bad a$s does. There's your pep talk for today. Go Run." -- Slo_Hand